The call for papers for the State of the Map 2009 closes on the 3rd May. Â You have just over one more week to get your presentations in. Â As a reminder, here are the themes for this year’s conference:

OSM 2011 – How do we take OpenStreetMap from 100,000 to 1,000,000 contributors?

New Mapping Frontiers – Learn how OpenStreetMap is expanding into new communities, new regions and mapping new features.

OpenStreetMap Application Development – Hear about the latest and greatest applications developed by the OpenStreetMap community

Tools Tips and Techniques – Get expert advice from the people who created the tools! Â Learn about editors, map renderers and more.

We had some fantastic submissions and ideas so far, on subjects ranging from how OSM can combine data from other sources to create a richer map, exploration of the quality of OSM data, how we’ll build the community out to 1,000,000 contributors to building the next generation of slippy maps that will render vector data in the browser. Â If you like OSM, you’ll love the State of the Map.

The OpenStreetMap API is now in Read Only mode while the upgrade/migration to 0.6 is undertaken. The API will be in this mode (or at times totally unavailable) until the changes are complete, which at the moment is expected to be some time on Monday April 20th.

During the upgrade OSM contributors will not be able to save their editing to the OSM database and the online editor, potlatch, will be disabled.

Once the upgrade is complete be sure to also upgrade your OSM editing software to ensure compatibility with API 0.6. Potlatch will be updated as part of the migration process.

With the upcoming API 0.6 the technical team have made several discoveries of the overall performance of Ruby, MySQL and the code used to run OSM. They’ve found that with MonetDB and the cherokee webserver we can speed things up considerably, and reduce the CPU count. This system has been reliably tested by Tom Hughes and Matt Amos as hundreds of times faster than the current setup. The speed increases are incredible to the point where the DB almost seems to know map edits before they happen and the HTTP and DB transactions tend to 0ms over time, and 0% of the XML API transaction itself.

Of course partly this is because it’s been re-written in C++ and all clients, particularly potlatch, now will be using the new binary protocol. Richard Fairhurst, the potlatch dictator, has been in close and positive contact with the authors of the new system to make this shift and has been working openly to encourage new developers to help rework potlatch. Improvements will include basic usability.

Unfortunately some of the work has pushed back the API switchover and a working group has been set up to decide on a date to announce the new date for switchover.

To counterbalance this bad news however, there is a silver lining – the license process has completed. From today the OSM database is available under the NDL [1], a variant of the original ODbL and closely similar in purpose and intent of the Duke Nukem Forever release process, which has shone industry-wide as an example of best practices.